Edna O’Brien, (born December 15, 1930, Twamgraney, County Clare, Ireland), Irish novelist, short-story writer, and screenwriter whose work has been noted for its portrayal of women, evocative description, and sexual candour. Like the works of her predecessors James Joyce and Frank O’Connor, some of her books were banned in Ireland.

O’Brien began to produce sketches and tales during childhood. She received a strict Irish Catholic convent education and went on to study pharmacy in Dublin, where she received a license in 1950. In 1952 she married the novelist Ernest Gebler, with whom she had two sons. In 1959 the couple moved to London, where O’Brien turned to writing as a full-time occupation. She was divorced from Gebler in the mid-1960s.

O’Brien’s popular first novel, The Country Girls (1960), was the first volume of The Country Girls Trilogy. It had as its main characters two Irish girls who leave their strict homes and convent school for the excitement and romantic opportunities of Dublin. The girls’ subsequent lives are traced in The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), by which time both have settled in London and have become disillusioned with marriage and men in general. Among O’Brien’s many subsequent novels are August Is a Wicked Month (1965), Casualties of Peace (1966), Night (1972), Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977; U.S. title I Hardly Knew You), The High Road (1988), House of Splendid Isolation (1994), Down by the River (1996), In the Forest (2002), and The Light of Evening (2006). The Little Red Chairs (2015) was widely praised for its acutely observed characterization of an Irish villager who has an ill-fated affair with a war criminal in hiding.

O’Brien’s novels express her despair over the condition of women in contemporary society and, in particular, attack women’s repressive upbringing. Her heroines search unsuccessfully for fulfillment in relationships with men, typically engaging in doomed love trysts as a remedy for their loneliness and emotional isolation. The bleak tone of O’Brien’s novels is, however, broken by flights of lyrical description and by the heroines’ attainment of brief periods of happiness.

Collections of O’Brien’s short stories appeared as The Love Object (1968), A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974), A Fanatic Heart (1984), Lantern Slides (1990), and Saints and Sinners (2011). She also wrote plays, screenplays for film and television, and nonfiction about Ireland. In 1999 her short study James Joyce was published to critical acclaim. She chronicled the frenetic passions of Lord Byron in Byron in Love (2009). Country Girl, O’Brien’s 2012 memoir, traced her passage from the repressive confinement of the rural Irish town where she was raised to the rarefied existence afforded by her success as a novelist.

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The 1960s changed Irish culture, often painfully. In literary terms, the government censorship of the preceding 30 years began to be challenged in a more sustained fashion. In 1960 Edna O’Brien published The Country Girls, the first novel in a trilogy that helped open up discussion of the role of women and sex in Irish society and of Roman Catholicism’s oppressive force...

three novels by Edna O’Brien that follow the lives of friends Kate and Baba from their school days and strict Roman Catholic upbringing in the Irish countryside to their disillusioned adulthood and failed marriages in London. The trilogy consists of The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). In 1986 the three novels, with an...

Feb. 2, 1882 Dublin, Ire. Jan. 13, 1941 Zürich, Switz. Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).